


Pieces of Him

by boazpriestly



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Castiel Loves Dean Winchester, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:14:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28103010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boazpriestly/pseuds/boazpriestly
Summary: Castiel copes by trying to complete the puzzle of Dean that he's holding onto in his mind. It isn't perfect, but it's the best he's got.
Relationships: Castiel (Supernatural)/Original Male Character(s), Castiel/Dean Winchester
Kudos: 4





	Pieces of Him

You find pieces of him in everyone you meet, and you make a mess of yourself in your haste to collect them all. You stretch your grace thin, needing to complete the picture in your mind because it’s the only thing you have left of him, no matter how distorted it will undoubtedly become.

So you smile at a woman in Delaware whose mouth forms the same shape as his once did the first time he spoke your name in a barn, long before you knew that this is what the sound would make of you.

You assist an old man changing his tire on the side of a road in Detroit, though assist is only a selective term since all you do is hold the tire iron and listen to the man complain. Still, his stubbornness to ask you to do more, even as his thin arms shake and his hands falter more than you are able to count, make you reminisce of the weight of the world on the shoulders of a young boy who desperately attempted to convince himself that he could do everything on his own.

When you thread your fingers into the open spaces of the hand of a beautiful man in Pennsylvania, you revel in the way his callous skin almost matches the war torn roughness you’re used to. It takes him kissing your cheek to realize that the texture of his hands was the only thing you want to keep of him.

Your chest aches in Albuquerque as you take time to memorize the familiar spatter of freckles across the face of a redheaded woman who looks and acts nothing like him; she has three freckles more than him and you decide it’s the closest you will ever get. When she dips her hands beneath your shirt, you close your eyes and imagine that it’s him; that you are tangled up with him in the bed you were never able to share with him before he was taken away from you. It only works until she says your name; you’re glad you’ve already collected a voice.

10:30 p.m. on a cold August night finds you naked beneath a young marine with hair the exact length and color as you remember. He kisses his way down you chest, scraping his teeth over your skin ever so often, forcing you to arch up to meet wherever his mouth has decided to taste you. His lips don’t match what you’re looking for, but his friend’s do, so you reach up and pull the second man down to you. He kisses like he’s desperate, like he’s been waiting all his life for this exact moment; you moan your appreciation onto his tongue. The man with the correct hair let’s out a small laugh as he runs his tongue along the length of your erection. You shiver, but don’t take your mouth away from the lips you’ve been craving since they first called out to you in Hell. In the end, you leave before either of them can fuck you because you have what you need from them; anything else would warp the puzzle you were putting together.

It’s in Pontiac, Illinois that you collect the final piece of the him that you’ve been searching for for over a year. You laugh as you look at the young child peering at you through the slats of the bus seat in front of you; her eyes glow magnificently in the exactly the same shade as his; you almost swear that she’s related to him somehow. She pops her head up and sticks her tongue out at you, then sinks back down in hiding. It figures, you think. That of all the people you’ve met, and all the pieces you’ve borrowed, it would be an innocent child who kept his eyes safe. The girl plays peek-a-boo with you again and this time you join the game. You stick your tongue out at her and cross your eyes and she squeals with delight. Her mother says something to her and she turns around in her seat. You get off at the next stop before she turns back around.

That night you dream that you’re in a room filled with mirrors; one for each piece you have of him. You’re supposed to put all the pieces together on one big mirror so that you can see him whole and maybe talk to him for a while, but instead you find an iron hammer in the corner of the room and smash every single mirror except the one in the center of the room. Tears stream down your face as you look at the broken shards covering the floo.; You walk over them and realize that you’re barefoot; blood runs like a river, but you can’t feel anything. You’re numb until you’re standing in from of the remaining mirror, and then all you can do in suck in a deep breath and hold it because what you see in the mirror is only you. He isn’t there and you know exactly what it means.

You don’t cry when you wake up, even though it’s all you want to do. Instead you pull on his old clothes – his favorite AC/DC shirt, ripped jeans, old boots that are just a little too big for your feet, and that well worn leather jacket that he never let out of his sight – grab his keys from their place by the front door, and start driving down the road in the car he swore he’d never let you drive as long as he was alive. You huff at the thought, pushing the heel of your palm against your eyes to keep from losing control before you get to your destination. You need to keep it in until the right moment or you’re never going to be able to finish what you started out to do all those months ago.

It takes you an hour to get where you want to be, but only a minute to walk to the middle of the clearing where he first breathed the new life you gave him. The trees are still cracked and laying flat in a circle around the grave his brother had made for him. The wooden cross with his name on it is still standing, though, and you touch is with shaking fingers. He isn’t buried here, or anywhere, but it’s the closest thing you have to a memorial and it will have to do. So you drop to your knees and close your eyes.

“I’m sorry,” You whisper. Your voice shakes as hard as your hands, and suddenly your tears flow like someone opened a flood gate inside of you. You can’t stop them, and you don’t really want to. “I tried to move on like you said to, but I can’t.” You rest your forehead against the cross and try to breath normally. You try and conjure up in your mind all the pieces you collected over the past year, but you remember quickly that you broke them all in your dream and you cry even harder. This isn’t how you’re supposed to live the rest of your life. You were supposed to grow old with him. You were supposed to marry him and adopt children with him, you’d talked about it so many times. You’d had it all planned out. But now….

“I miss you so much, Dean.“

You listen for his voice or some sort of sign that he can hear you wherever he is, but all you hear is the wind blowing past you. And just like that, you finally let him go.

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't mark this as Major Character Death because while Dean is gone in this fic, I don't know exactly how he died. And I feel like the focus of the fic isn't Dean's death, but Castiel learning how to live without him.


End file.
